Lately I have been struggling. It has been a multifarious beast that has
beset me. It started late last year with the onset of some medical problems,
which while not life threatening were natheless vexive; continued through an
incredible array of assaults upon my art & person by many small-minded
would-be artists who loathed my website & its contents; scurried with
several legal scraps resultant from said assaults; survived a car crash &
its own legal outfalling; weathered many small storms lost to the very moments
they briefly burped up out of & back down in to; as well the adoption of 2
cats, 1 of which- a kitten- needed some medical attendance that my better sense
told me my wallet should avoid, but which I ignored; yet has seen its
florescence most greatly in my several month barrenness to compose some of my
patented longer poems on historical things, folk, & stuff. True, I have
still written great poems of a smaller kind- sonnets especially. But in recent
years it has been these dense mini-epics which have defined by artistic impulse-
if not me. They do, however, require great concentration & periods of
aloneness in which to structure them properly, as well attain the requisite
‘in’ to the subject matter- which allows for a relatively easy time in
writing the poem. But all these other complications have cut in to my time,
complicated by the diurnal calls of employment, household chores, & dutiful
husbandship to my bride, which has been left to gather my art from the relative
scree of short lyric poetry.

So, I have set about decomplexing my life. My concentration will be
mainly focused on recharging the batteries which have enlivened by my verse such
topics as Paul Bunyan, Quanah Parker, Nat Turner, Marshall McLuhan, Andrew
Carnegie, Richard Nixon, Grandma
Chin, & a host of other personages you may
be familiar with from my poetry. Poetry, you see- is where I am the artist. I
must do it at home, in my den, weaving tapestry from the fragments of lines,
ideas, & words crammed into & onto small pieces of cellulose I tote
around in my ceaseless lighted wanderings through the minutes. Essayry (dare I
be so bold to coin?) is a diversion from the ‘real art’ of poetry. I do so
in the down times at home & at work, culling them from the vagabondia that
inhabits, & occasionally inhibits, my mind.

But what to essay? Initially, this spacetime construct (which I
previously thought) was reserved for an essay on William Shakespeare & the
idea of greatness in verse. But it has been usurped. Sorry, Willy, but we shall
engage again, shortly. Instead, I have been contracted by some weird oozing of
duty to enrich you, I hope, with the knowledge of another great writer- 1 you
probably are unfamiliar with, unless you have been an itinerant scanner of both
poetry & science writing. The writer is Loren Eiseley. The book & reason
for this essay is his autobiography All
the Strange Hours. Its subtitle hints at both the man’s existence &
its aim: The Excavation Of A Life. Eiseley (henceforth LE) was a
well-respected anthropologist, scientist, & essayist. In his spare time he
was also a poet. Many years have passed since I had read his engaging essays. He
mastered what might be called the Covert
InnerEssay- i.e.- those which tie
in the ostensible subject matter at hand with whatever the essayist really
sought to speak of: personal axes, incidents, or other such muses. Think of this
not then as much an essay nor an homage- per se- but rather as an experiment in
persuasion. OK?

As a child growing up in the late 60s & early 70s (right before the
outburst of this current Golden Age of science writing began) I was compelled to
marvel nature, even though Golden Guide
books & How, Why & Wonder
books were my lone baedekers to the world which lay beyond the asphalt abode I
squalored in. Then, about 2nd or 3rd grade I discovered a
book of essays- I forget the title- by LE. Even now I am singularly bereft of
their content. But what mattered was that somehow THEY mattered & stuck in
me. Whether they got me from a library shelf, a neighbor’s unkempt reading
chair, or a forgotten chum’s bookbag is no matter. The name stuck in me as 1
of the people of substance. LE was a name that hovered in the fog of callow
impressionability as a person who was bigger than we people that people like us
meet in the day-to-day. Yet, even so, time trudged & years would see no
intertwinement of us twain until I entered the sphere of poetry many years
later. To my astonishment I encountered LE’s name on a number of occasions in
old magazines. A few competent, if not spectacular, poems rekindled my awareness
of that NAME from my childhood- that visage I had never glimpsed yet which had
urged me on through my urban upbringing with the knowledge that there was more
to living than my paychecks & failed attempts to win female ardor. But most
of his books were out of print, especially his poetry & I’ve yet, to this
writing, been able to secure a Selected
or Collected edition of his poetry.
But, a month or 2 ago, trudging through a used bookstore- the source of many a
poetical discovery as the verse of James
Emanuel, Judith Wright, &
Hazel
Hall- I came upon that familiar name. I glanced, saw it was an autobiography,
thought it would be an interesting read, a sojourn back to my years earlier
foray, bought it, & let it reside a few weeks in my pile of other books
needing my eyes to bring forth a life from them that lay dormant since prior
perusals. Then I decided to read the book. As I write these words it is only
minutes from finishing the book & many was the time I had to put the tome
aside to let the thoughts & emotions gather in me. As well dispel the
occasional impulse to sigh or tear. Such the unexpected power that the book
held. Far more so than his brilliant essays (yet agleam through the strewn
cobwebs of early surmise), & infinitely more so than his rather pedestrian
poetry, this book touched me like only 3 other books had done so previously. All
3 of the prior books had results which affected my existence greatly, & as
yet I can only vaguely premonitor what will awash in its digestion.

The 1st of the books was Alex Haley’s Autobiography
of Malcolm X. In the ghosted pages detailing that brief foray of breath in
form I 1st found a real kindred in words. An odd pairing, at 1st
blush, I admit. But lighten Malcolm Little’s skin, move him forward 30 years,
& lop a decade off the age of the teen Malcolm’s adventures & 1
curiously finds a near blow-by-blow assessment of my childhood in the gloomed
streets of Ridgewood, Queens- just a bullet’s chip away from the Stygian
heroin galleries of Bushwick, Brooklyn. I must have been in my mid-teens when I
encountered the tale. I do not recall whether it was an assigned read at school
or a chance encounter at a library. No matter. It mattered. And like it,
something in LE’s tale touches me as kindred. While Malcolm represents a
shared past, perhaps it is LE’s ruminations on his past which coincide with
mine on my past? LE seemed to (for he died in 1977) see things similar to me. He
noticed the same sorts of things. And likewise he valued those same things. The
little MidWestern someday scientist & poet & the little New York someday
blue collar & poet congressed in these shapes of thought laid upon paper-
both his & mine- spaced by decades & divergent experience. But where
Malcolm & I would diverge- he into criminality & religion; me from it-
LE & I would converge. As I write this essay I find myself not only drawn to
his book’s subject matter, but to the very style of writing. Quite odd, the
dovetail of our prosaic scribblings. I would like to think that he would be as
moved by my verse as I by his book. This hoped for connection a strange
afterbeat to my long ago hope that my poem Big
Red, on Malcolm, would have comforted him as much as his youth comforted
mine- if only in its resonant similarities. Especially cogent to my heart is
LE’s approach to animals- both his natural scientist’s inquiry, & his
human probing of the other things a scientist is not concerned with. I think of
that duality of vision probing down upon the life arcs of me & Malcolm &
wonder with what facility of wordplay he would render us into another’s mind.

The 2nd book that affected my life, & which LE’s book
hearkens to in a different way, is old Walt Whitman’s Leaves
Of Grass. I have written & spoken much of the Good Gray One in the past
& will not rehash my affection for the book’s poems’ virtuosity &
vision, its sentiments & embankments into my day. Suffice to say that
Whitman would have welcomed LE as I welcome them both. But while it was not LOG
that got me to 1stwrite
poetry, it was LOG that kept me from
abandoning poetry after its initial allure hooked me in my dull post-high
school days. In reading, especially LE’s descriptions of his Depression-era
adventures as a hobo, 1 cannot but see the thick vein of masculine Americana
bind Whitman to Sandburg to Langston Hughes to Hart Crane to LE to (known only
to me till now) my dad to me. Passages are rife with that very world gifted to
me by my CCC-polished dad & his memories told & retold till near-nausea
would result at their mere scent, & reflected in my own later descents into
the impoverished areas of American being. The recurrent episode where LE
encounters & recalls a stray dog that hangs tenaciously through his years’
desperate attempts at sloughing it off is worth the price of the book alone. So,
too, am I reminded of my early memory of a stray cat named Friend, the 1st
time I saw a man murdered, & all the things that bind that particularity to
a place trailing behind me not too far. The rhythms of that beautiful versic
book inform LE’s book as it once 1st cooed to me. And both find
tears in my asides from them.

The 3rd book is, doubtless, less familiar in name as well
memory, than the 1st 2. I 1st encountered it on a
shuffling through a used bookstore’s inventory. It is Leonard Shlain’s Art
& Physics. When I 1st read it, a few years back, it helped to
reorder my conceptions on Modern Art. I always knew instinctively that a great
painting worked while a bad one didn’t. I also had a constant love for physics
& astronomy- that lone great rival in science, to dinosaurs, that vied for
young Yankee youths’ attentions. This book melded the 2 seamlessly. I now
understood how & perhaps why great paintings worked; a thing that I almost instinctively
understood with words (& poems especially) but was missing in the visual
arts. Such insights then informed countless poems, most which had no ostensible
connection to painting, & led me ultimately to my recently completed
manuscript of great painting poems called
The 49 Gallery. What Rodin was to Rilke’s New Poems Shlain’s book was to my poetry of the past few years. It
reordered my vision & gave burn to my Muse. Similarly, I feel, LE’s book
has torched a similar light. For months (& even years) I have had ideas
lurking for poems on the Dust Bowl, the Rape Of Nanking, the 5th
& final poem to my epic American
Imperium poem series, & assorted Omnisonnets, Le Bestiare, What
If?, Krazy Kat, Mario Culcasi, & Rosario poem series. If I’m correct,
LE’s book has similarly reordered my vision and refired my poetic ideas to set
about yet another attempt at resurrection via poetry. Yes, I said it- the word resurrection.
Is not that the true goal of every writer or artist? Do we not hope to engage
near infinite resurrections of our thoughts & emotions in the minds &
vitae of our audience? And in those thoughts & emotions we resurrect the
people & events & things dear to us? I do. Every reader seeks to make
the world of another theirs- however briefly. This very converse is the sine
qua non of art. It is at once the most intimate & selfish of acts- but
all art! It is at once the most demotic & altruistic of acts- still, all
art! It is the very thing we cloak to our inmost. We make art to be politic,
religiot, to be creative, human- or so we declaim. And while each of these aims
is true in some art I have grown to
believe that these mini-resurrections of the past are the dominant thread that
binds all art- it is the communication
of these things which grip & heave us into each others’ living-oh. Well, maybe not. But it sounds nice. It moves me to such
respirations, & that is the point that seems to glare at me from LE’s
words & ideas, every bit as much as Shlain’s book- & the other books-
did.

The book by LE is divided into 3 main sections: Days
Of A Drifter, Days Of A Thinker,
& Days Of A Doubter. The 1st
of the 3- Drifter- concerns mostly LE’s youth through college & mid-20s.
It has some of the most beautiful & poetically heart-wrenching prose I have
read. His detailed episodes as a rail-riding hobo, assorted illnesses, his call
to the natural & an episode in Mexico with an ex-hood from Detroit are
marvelous. LE resurrects the Great Depression & Dust Bowl iconism with an
eye & ear greater than Steinbeck. This section’s closest literary
antecedent is Kenneth Rexroth’s Kenneth
Rexroth: An Autobiographical Novel, however- as good & even great as
that book is in sections- as a whole it never coheres nor moves 1 to the
totality of empathy that LE’s work in this section does. It is this fidelity
to the unnoticed conflated almost effortlessly with larger themes, & the
utter Occam’s Razor-like detailing, that draws me because it is so resonant
with my own writing style- both prosaic & poetic. There are a number of
passages & images that will be with me always. Not only that, but it is the
very way he uses words to damn-near holographically duplicate the scientific
process of inspecting & investigating things. In my aforementioned poetic
struggles of late it has been a combination of lack of time plus an exhaustion
of ‘ins’- or approaches to poetry as a craft & myriad subjects. To
constantly attract & retain a reader’s interest 1 simply cannot repeat
things as subject & style too often. LE’s prosecraft, I believe, has given
me a much needed fresh perspective; 1 I hope will last a good while.

The 2nd section- Thinker- has a more broad approach. LE
ruminates in a style more in kinship with his essays, yet he still leaves images
& weaves tales from his past that endure: his train ride to Philadelphia
next to a mammoth would-be scab sailor, the life & death of an academic
mentor who retreated into shamanism, a talented cat, a dying black man, &
his ongoing encounters with occasional deafness. All leave impressions of
varying kind, degree, & heft. Yet there is the oversoul of the man that
flows through & under & about & in each sentence of the book.
Philosophy masquerades as description. Humor oozes through as memory. Intellect
girds with personal enmities great & not, fleeting & decades-long. In
the whirr of a life LE has lent more of himself to the reader than any other
biography I have ever read- & certainly more than any other autobiography.
But the great thing of the matter is this: he suffers not 1 whit from the
pornographically insincere self-flagellation or self-apotheosis most
autobiographers indulge in & try to fob off as ‘honest examination’. For
example: I cannot only not recall his wife’s nor parents’ nor
brother’s names, but I cannot even recall if any but his brother’s was
mentioned. Yet I know this family. I know it from the Point Of View of a 5 year
old granted another year’s freedom from the stricture of schoolery due to his
parents’ largesse after a mid-winter escape by convicts from the local prison
spur them to decision. I know this man’s mother by a varicosing vein popping
heavenward from his mother’s body. I know this man from his father’s
re-emergence in his dying brother’s (or, rather, ½ brother’s) visage. I
know his childhood from a near-death incident spawned from a tattered science
book on aquaria. I know his wife from comments on his deafness & stray cats,
not from some wordly rampart-erected entrée into their boudoir. This is
insight. This is autobiography. This is GREAT WRITING!

The last section- Doubter- mixes memory with the aforementioned
sections’ main thrusts. Here is where the man encounters his mother, his self,
& a cat that talks. Here is where the man’s real nature as a poet breaks
upon the difficulty of breath’s increase.Here is where LE makes his mark not just as a GREAT science writer- say,
in the mold of such contemporary writers as Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould,
Carl Sagan, Steven Pinker, or Jared Diamond- but as a GREAT WRITER, period.
Perhaps the only other writers about science that immediately spring to mind as
being near- but not equal to- LE are the fictionists Alan Lightman in Einstein’s
Dreams, Edwin Abbott in Flatland,
& essayist Wyn Wachhorst. But Lightman is fictive & all style, Abbott
secularly theistic & whimsical, & Wachhorst never as consistently
‘in’ his essays as LE, & certainly not the scientist LE was. The mix of
science with the personal is never forced to drive home a point, it is never
wrenched by the obsessive tics & fealties to dogmas & heroes, nor is it
merely a polysyllabic orgy deemed to impress with thesauric miasma. As with the
rest of the book more is revealed in what the man notices & how he notices
it, than in what happens. To LE the event is not so important as the way it is
remembered. This is a sentiment that I confess to having long held & known
as true. The way humans inflect themselves into the world & attach
themselves to things in an attempt to create metaphor unconsciously is something
LE is both at peace with, & at marvel of.

As I put down this book, now a day later than when I initially started
this piece, I was struck by time’s distort during its reading. Not only did
the craft of writing consciously do that upon the page, but within my cranial
nook time ebbed & dashed in varied rhythms to such an extent that my both my
emotions & intellect were disjuncted. So much so that I realize that I may
have sinned. I have not excerpted pieces of LE’s craft. Did I write an essay?
Did I review & critique it? Did I merely effuse? Did I declaim more
copiously on the book’s apportive effect on my creativity than draw you to it?
Did I put trust in you that yours in me & my words would kindle you to be
where I am? Perhaps. But, maybe, I shall just content myself toreread it & you shall desire our company in some small resurrections.
& if this experiment of mine has failed do not blame poor dead LE, or what
was his life- the brunt is rightfully all mine. So, too, his book.